The Writers Toolbox

Writing can serve many helpful tools. Mind mapping, concept mapping, free writing, brain writing, and word lists are all good ways to enhance your creative thoughts. These techniques should reflect your thinking process and the relationships words have with one another. Writing can help organize thoughts and turn them into ideas. Writing is diverse enough for different styles of thinking and learning. Creative geniuses in the past have been noted for making mind mapping skills similar to the ones we use today. A mind map is putting a visual form to words that create ideas. The purpose of using this method is to come up with new ideas. You make connections with words that relate to your main words by circling the words and drawing lines to connect them. This is a good way to explore, expand, or understand a topic. A concept map is analysis of relationship and meaning of the main word. This technique includes propositional links to ideas that relate to each other. This is a step further than mind mapping by focusing on systems of thinking. Free writing is letting words flow out of your head on to your paper. This is a good way to bring hidden thoughts to words.  Free writing can help you develop a more critical and creative evaluation of your main idea. This is similar to journaling because you can write whatever comes to mind. Brain writing is also what a lot of people refer to as brainstorming which is a quick way to generate ideas in a group. By listening to the members of your group more ideas rise. Word lists are words that relate to your topic and precede each other down on different lines of the page. This technique is appealing to the eye and is a quick technique.

I personally find many of these tools helpful. The most helpful of the tools to me is mind mapping. I like mind mapping because of its ability to make connections and branches on to ideas. Mind mapping clearly shows thought process and relationship. I enjoy the connections mind mapping makes because it helps me make clearity of my idea. I also like using word lists. Word lists are helpful to me because it is quick and it is a good start to generating ideas.